'The Last Alchemist' by Iain McCalman

History's magic manItalian adventurer inspires another writer

FOR more than 200 years people have been fascinated with Italian adventurer, mountebank, alchemist, magician and all-around con man Count Allesandro di Cagliostro. Dozens of books have been written about him (in French, German, Italian and English), most of them still in print, including the earliest, published in 1791, four years prior to his death.

This year alone, three new books about Cagliostro have appeared: Michael Harrison's Cagliostro: Nature's Unfortunate Child; Frank King's Cagliostro: Last of the Sorcerers; and this one by Iain McCalman, professor of history at the Australian National University and the editor of the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age.

In addition, his life has been the basis for a ballet; an opera (Strauss' Cagliostro in Vienna); several operatic characters, including the evil magician Sarastro in Mozart's The Magic Flute; along with scores of films, perhaps the best-known in English being Spawn (1997), The Mummy (1932), The Affair of the Necklace (2001) and Black Magic (1949), the last with Orson Welles as Cagliostro. Along with Svengali and Houdini, his name has become a synonym for magic.

Cagliostro's life relates the familiar story of rags to riches, only in his case it's rags to riches and back to rags. It's the story of how a poor boy from Sicily, with little formal education and little social advantage, turned himself into an international celebrity, rich and famous, adored and despised, who ultimately wound up in chains in a dungeon, where he suffered a miserable death.

Cagliostro was born Giuseppe Balsamo in 1743 (the same year as Thomas Jefferson) of a Moorish and perhaps Jewish background (McCalman claims that in his later years Cagliostro compared himself to Ahaseurus, the Wandering Jew, but there is little evidence for this).

He grew up in the slums of Palermo and may have been for a time the leader of a street gang. At 10 he was sent to a seminary for orphans and later was enrolled as a novice monk at the monastery of the Fatebenefratelli, an order that specialized in the healing arts, where he probably gained his knowledge of drugs and chemistry.

Along the way, perhaps at the monastery, perhaps in the streets, he became proficient in the arts and crafts of prognostication, astrology, forgery and hermetic lore, including the Kabbala and the Gematria, both highly esoteric mystical systems thought to enable the adept to predict the future and connect with the supernatural.

In 1768, at age 25, he arrived in Rome, where he continued to sharpen his skills in alchemy, healing and the occult arts. In Rome Giuseppe got his first big break, one that led him to fame, fortune and ultimately ruin: He met a lusty 14-year-old looker named Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani, whom he hurriedly married.

It wasn't long after the marriage that Giuseppe began prostituting his wife for cash and employment. As McCalman writes: "A succession of wealthy noblemen hired Giuseppe to work as an artist or chemist in exchange for regular sexual access to his young wife." It was his attractive young wife, if nothing else, that Giuseppe transformed into gold.

A month after their marriage, the couple left Rome and, accompanied by a pair of crooked sidekicks, grifted their way through Italy, where among other flamboyant characters they met and befriended Casanova. In his memoirs Casanova writes that he found Seraphina "interesting by reason of her youth and beauty," although, oddly enough, there is no evidence of any sexual intimacy between the two. Casanova couldn't decide if the Cagliostros were clever con artists or what they claimed to be: poor pilgrims visiting holy shrines throughout Europe.

On a second trip to London, in 1776, Giuseppe decided to move up the social ladder and to this end remade himself into Colonel Pellegrini (after the mountain in Sicily), the famous occult scientist. Seraphina (as she came to be called) became Countess Cagliostro (the surname of Giuseppe's uncle), and the pair announced themselves thereafter as Colonel and Countess Pellegrini-Cagliostro. In time the Pellegrini got dropped. Giuseppe became simply Count Allesandro di Cagliostro and Seraphina Countess Cagliostro.

Also at this time, in spring of 1776, in order to further advance his social standing he joined a Masonic Lodge. Because of the association of Freemasonry with ancient and secret symbols and rites known only to initiates, Cagliostro saw an opportunity to become a powerful sorcerer and seer -- a master of the occult. His initiation into the Masonic Lodge became, as McCalman writes, "the transformative moment of his life ... the death of an old identity and the start of a new."

Taking a lead from Umberto Eco, McCalman makes the shrewd observation that Cagliostro's association with the so-called "Masonic conspiracy" ultimately led to Nazism and the Holocaust. By the 20th century, McCalman writes, "Templars, Illuminati, and Egyptian Masons had given way to the Protocols of Zion, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and the world conspiracy of Judaism." Hitler, for example, believed that Italian Freemasonry was behind the underground plot to capture and murder Mussolini.

In his new guise as Grand Masonic Copt and Rosicrucian potentate, Cagliostro traveled throughout Europe, setting up Masonic Temples, promoting his magical powers and associating with the elite of European society, including, at one point, Catherine the Great of Russia. One French noblewoman, after meeting him, concluded that "Cagliostro was possessed of a demonic power, he enthralled the mind and paralysed the will."

Not everyone, however, was convinced of his authenticity. The English historian Thomas Carlyle referred to him as an "Arch-Quack" and claimed that Cagliostro's life was proof that the 18th century, far from being an age of reason and enlightenment, was really an age of irrationality and superstition.

Even when his schemes led to trouble, Cagliostro usually managed to con his way out, especially with Seraphina's aid. He was imprisoned briefly for his complicity in the so-called Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a national scandal that involved Marie Antoinette, Cardinal de Rohan, the cardinal's mistress, plus a host of other questionable characters. For their duplicitous efforts in the affair, both the cardinal and Cagliostro spent time in the Bastille before being acquitted. In the end, the whole business proved for Cagliostro a great public relations event, making him more popular than ever.

Ultimately, Cagliostro's notoriety as a magician and his promotion of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism came under attack by the Catholic Church, which saw Cagliostro and his doctrines as a threat to its authority. It was even rumored that he was a revolutionist trying to undermine religion and overthrow the old order. One aristocrat went so far as to claim that "he started the French Revolution."

Captured in Rome by the papal police and put on trial by the Inquisition for heresy and for professing Egyptian Freemasonry, he was judged guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress of San Leo, where he died in 1795. He was 52.

During the trial his wife turned on him and accused him of forcing her to prostitute herself and of preventing her from practicing her true faith, Roman Catholicism. Her repentance, however, did her little good. She too was found guilty and spent her remaining days in the convent of Saint Appolonia, a prison in Rome, where she went mad.

McCalman's book would have benefited enormously from an index and a bibliography; and the source notes -- often indefinite, imprecise or absent -- are generally useless. But on the whole, this is a readable and entertaining account of the life and times of one of history's more colorful and intriguing characters, a self-proclaimed magus and alchemist whose greatest trick, beyond any doubt, was the transformation of his own life from lead to gold and then back again to lead.